#structured mind

Throughout Jung’s lifetime, most psychologists maintained that children were passive recipients of maternal care and that they became attached to their mothers because they were fed by them (the so-called ‘cupboard love’ theory). Jung maintained, on the contrary, that children actively participated in the formation of all their relationships with the world, insisting that it was ‘a mistake to suppose [as did the majority of his contemporaries] that the psyche of the newborn child is a tabula rasa in the sense that there is absolutely nothing in it’ (CW IX. i, para. 136). We bring with us an innate psychic structure enabling us to have the experiences typical of our kind.